People on Earth were on average about as free at the start of 2016 as they were a year earlier, and the average global resident remained much freer than at almost any time in modern history. [...]
But what does the group mean by “free”? Since the early 1970s, Freedom House has assessed freedom in countries along two dimensions: political rights and civil liberties. To measure political rights, it considers how a government is chosen, how well it functions and how citizens participate in those processes. To measure civil liberties, the group assesses the extent of freedoms of speech, assembly, association and conscience, along with the rule of law. Each year, in-house analysts and expert advisers score nearly 200 countries on more than two dozen questions, and those scores are combined and compared to determine how freedom is changing within countries. [...]
When we consider the freedom of the average person instead of the average country by accounting for these differences in population size, the result we get is heavily influenced by trends in political rights and civil liberties in the relatively small group of very big countries. The plot below shows annual freedom scores for the world’s 10 largest countries since 2002. These scores are the averages of rescaled versions of the raw political rights and civil liberties data, which Freedom House has only published from 2002 onward, instead of the coarser seven-point scales on which the previous chart was based. [...]
That statistic is of questionable value, however, because it arguably focuses on the wrong unit of analysis. When we switch to a lens that considers the status of individual humans instead of the countries they inhabit, we find only a slight decline in freedom over the past decade. A lot of awful things have happened around the world in the past few years, but a sharp decline in the political rights and civil liberties enjoyed by the average person is not one of them.
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